I am home for the holidays.
It is a quintessential young adult American tradition I’ve never participated in to its fullest extent until this year. I’ve been home – where my parents are – but to a place I’d never been, or had barely been.
But now, I’m sleeping in my old twin bed with my old quilt and old sheets, my dresser littered with relics. In my closet is an Easter dress from when I was maybe four, and a box filled with my favorite stuffed animals I can’t quite part with in a house that feels like it’s mine. This is my house. My shoes are kicked off haphazardly by the door; I borrow my brother’s toothpaste and my mom’s hair dryer. I remember the books and DVDs and art on the shelves. It smells like my family. There is history here, in a way that feels foreign and familiar at the same time. There’s also a Roomba, which I think is both adorable and also probably evil.
Out my window at night I used to see the faint glow of a 7-Eleven sign. It felt then like this was a sign I lived in the big city. The area has grown up in the nearly twenty years since; there are some very nice apartments on that lot and a ramen shop that’s just okay. It feels quiet to me now, a cute downtown with an indie coffee shop. It’s not what I used to imagine it to be.
I update my library card at the local branch down the street, my account lapsed after all this time. I have to get a new card. I kept the old one though. The building’s been renovated. I wonder if they still have the Star Wars books I read so ravenously. I forget to check. The children’s section has its own floor now. I hear a pair of young siblings bickering downstairs as I borrow an honest-to-God literary fiction book.
Everything about being here feels smaller, sweeter, simpler.
In the basement back at the house are more boxes of my stuff. Books and toys and several containing schoolwork I wanted to save back in the day. I spend an afternoon poring over years of science class posters and language learning workbooks and history papers. Certificates for perfect attendance and intellectual curiosity and participation.
Most interesting to me now are the journals – a grade school classic, formative to writer-types like me.
I read every page of them. I can see glimmers of what would become my voice – conversational, a little sardonic, almost caustic, but somehow still optimistic. I am anxious about every move, grieving every goodbye. I don’t remember those feelings until middle school, but there they are; I was seven. I think I’m too cool (read: smart) for school but also so afraid I’m deeply uncool. I write a lot about God, trying so hard to figure it all out. I write a lot about disability, so clearly trying to teach myself how to be casual about it. I am so aware of how I exist in the world. Trying, at nine, to parse identity politics in ways that feel surprisingly prescient. I love my family. I delight in being American but living in Africa like it’s some kind of superpower. I want to do important things. I want to be a good person. I also want to be an orphanage owner (this is because of the musical Annie), and an astronaut (because of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum). And I want to be a writer.
I was never particularly good at math. My mom once stapled to my homework a note to my preschool teacher that I was “very upset” I accidentally colored in the second-biggest hat instead of the biggest. I was a prolific writer, but it took a while to learn how to spell, to get my bs and ds sorted. I forgot I had to learn things.
I don’t remember much of anything I learned in the one chemistry class I took in high school, but I found an old test – I got a B. I can’t remember a time before I knew and forgot those things. There was a time before I could do basic arithmetic. Before I knew how to read and write. That’s hard to wrap my mind around. I don’t remember not being aware of my body, constantly assessing how I’m perceived, how I compensate, how I wish it was different and also how alien that would feel. I don’t remember not thinking about God, though the questions I’m asking have changed. I did not know the words eschatology and teleology back then. But even then, I’m grasping at the same straws.
I suppose I have always been a deep thinker and an even deeper feeler.
Sitting here, in a pile of crayon drawings and notebooks and stapled-together presentation rubrics, there are suddenly a dozen lives I could have lived. What if I had gone into social work? Or sure, why not, astronomy. What is a dream if you don’t really even remember ever having it? Do you disappoint yourself by virtue of changing? What would my six-year-old self think if she saw me in the street? My name on the front page of a playbill? Riding the Metro?
Would she think I’ve made it?
I am sitting on the Metro reading a book.
This car is one of the old ones evading retirement – from the eighties I think – colorful and analog, a little musty and worn. I hear the old chimes & voice through the tinny speakers and suddenly I am six again.
When we moved, I was immediately enchanted by the public transit. The stations, like the city, felt grand and romantic. The trains, their routes, and stops were brimming with possibility. I held my parents’ hands, pressed tight against them in a crowded car.
It was our gateway to culture: restaurants and museums and memorials and live performance and sports games and history. It’s hard to describe exactly the wonder I felt.
This was a grown-up’s world, full of people commuting to work in the city in smart coats with soft hair and blazers and ties and makeup. They wore sneakers, but I knew they had heels or loafers tucked into their purses and briefcase to change into once they got to the office. They had important jobs. They did important things. Then, they went to fancy restaurants or the museums or the symphony. I’d watch them, wondering what they were listening to, what book they were reading, if they were happy. Then the train would jerk to a stop, the bells would chime – step back to allow customers to exit – and they’d go off into the big wide world. Step back, doors closing.
My brother, aged four, used to love to ride a line from end to end, transfer at one of the big stations, and do it again. My very patient mother spent many a Saturday humoring our fascination with the tunnels and the speed and the escalators.
My brother rides the subway into work now in a totally different city.
It’s mid-December, I’m off of work, coming home from dinner with friends in a city I’ve long claimed as home. I’m reading a paperback, worn from being tossed in backpacks and totebags. I am suddenly struck by the realization that this is my real life. I watch the gentle sway of the car ahead of me and listen for the ka-thunk as we get close to a station. It is all so wonderfully familiar and strange, to be my grown-up self here, living a version of my life I didn’t even know to hope for.
I feel, briefly, like this is all a cosplay. I’m playacting what it means to be an adult, I’m still that same six year old doing the thing I recognize those strangers on the train doing. There are three other people in the car with me, and I’m sure they’re all thinking, oh look at that little girl, acting so grown up. How cute.
Except they’re not. They’re probably not thinking about me at all, but if they are, it’s the passive acknowledgement that I am a person also here, and that’s about it.
It’s strange, isn’t it? To realize your own adult existence like that? My experience of being twenty-something has largely consisted of being consciously aware of my own development. It’s what I imagine teachers must feel when they see students understand a difficult topic, but it’s my own brain. Suddenly something clicks. And suddenly, in this old Metro car, it strikes me: the relentlessness of time, how places are exactly the same and also different, how I can be exactly the same and also different. That I probably sat in this exact car when I was a child. And now I’m an adult.
It is a gift to grow up, I think.
I’m at church with a friend.
She is perhaps my oldest friend, among the people I’ve known longest with whom I’m still in regular contact. From the third grade, our first time in Africa, to today, reconnected by Instagram direct messages and a deep affection for our faith and the million tiny culture shocks we experience every day.
She lives here now, and when I told her I was coming to visit, the first text she sent was: I can’t wait to bring you to church with me. You’ll love it.
So here we are, sitting next to each other for the first time in fifteen years, in a pew, singing Father, let your kingdom come.
We are sitting in the balcony, eye level with the chandeliers hanging from the cavernous ceiling and, distantly, the cross on the wall.
From here, we can’t see the congregation below us, just the front, where folks in robes lead us through the liturgy. These are prayers that have been spoken for hundreds of years across time and place and history. Today, the prayers for peace are hard to pray.
I involuntarily literally fist pump when the Prayer of Humble Access comes across the projection screen. They don’t normally say it, my friend tells me later. This was a gift from the Lord to me specifically, an in-joke between us. I get choked up as we pray.
It is Advent. We sing O Come O Come Emmanuel in line to receive communion.
I cry three separate times during that service. I often cry at church nowadays. It’s humbling and overwhelming and I’m just grateful. And here, at the church I’ve never been to that somehow feels like home, with this friend whom I haven’t seen in years that somehow will still trade voice notes with me about Southern Baptists and politics and also sometimes boys, it all feels truer.
It feels like watching myself and the people I love as we grow into ourselves.
I am in a hotel room in Florida.
It’s been over a month since that church service. We are now in Ordinary Time.
It’s been six weeks since I went home for the first time. I was there for just over a month. I went through a lot of my stuff, but not all of it.
I miss my parents. I miss that house and the bay window in the kitchen. I miss the Metro.
But I’m back in Florida, land of Publix and live oaks. Florida is, despite all odds, a home I can’t quite shake. It feels good to be back. The air smells familiar.
I’m here for work. I’ve worked here before. I know how to navigate this building. I know a lot of the people. I have my gym and my coffee shop and my brunch place and my bookstore and my little beach spot. I know which traffic lights are the long ones.
To return to a place is a rare luxury in my life and I am reveling in it.
I get to build on a foundation, carve new routes into terrain I’m already familiar with. Make new (better?) choices without scrambling to make heads or tails of it all first.
I get to do that a lot this year. I get to go back. To a series of homes away from homes away from homes, which could repeat infinitely. I’m settling down maybe, or a version of it. I’m excited about it. There is something specific about knowing that missing something or somewhere or someone will be fulfilled. That feels sacred. There’s an analogy here for something much bigger, but I’m content not quite naming it.
For now, I’m happy with the welcome back hugs and “excited to see you soon!” texts and knowing that my mom is keeping an eye out for the sock I lost at the house.
And I am here in Florida, again, older and wiser and also still exactly the same.
As a brief postscript: The working title of this draft in the Google Doc (I name them by theme and vibe) was “home, take 2.” That feels apt. This is a sequel, corollary, and somehow also inverse of everything I’ve written in the last year. Part of me feels like I’m repeating myself. In some ways I am, I guess, but don’t we always? I’m not sorry about it, I don’t think, but wanted to acknowledge it.
So, Um...Yeah 